It’s official: Warner Bros. is rebooting Michael Crichton’s 1973 Westworld film. Aptly penning the script is David Koepp, who wrote 1993’s Jurassic Park and a few of its sequels, making the upcoming reboot an exciting prospect for long-time fans of the franchise — even if Steven Spielberg isn’t directing. But Koep and WB’s new endeavor begs the question: Where does this leave the 2016 HBO series?
Created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, Westworld was a massive success in its first season, feeling more like high concept cinema than television, which likely helped earn the series 22 Emmy nominations. Using Crichton’s futuristic theme park as a foundation, Nolan and Joy explored identity, consciousness, free will, and the ethics of artificial intelligence years before ChatGPT made those conversations mainstream. Despite being positioned as HBO’s next Game of Thrones, Westworld steadily lost momentum with each passing season. By the end of Season 4 in 2022, average viewership had reportedly fallen by roughly 81% from the show’s first season, according to Nielsen ratings.
The decline wasn’t entirely surprising for anyone actually watching the show. Season 1 became a cultural phenomenon through its blend of mystery-box storytelling and philosophical sci-fi, introducing viewers to the park’s corporate owner Delos, its enigmatic founders, and the increasingly unstable relationship between humanity and the park’s artificial “hosts.” But Westworld season 2 drew criticism for its fragmented timeline and increasingly convoluted storytelling, and season 3 entirely abandoned the western setting for a sleek cyberpunk future centered on surveillance and algorithmic control. By season 4, Westworld was attempting to merge both identities together in a dystopian future ruled by unshackled robots, but much of the audience had already checked out. In a figurative sense, the hosts had long since left the park — both within the show and in the real world watching it.
Mere months after the season 4 finale aired, HBO officially cancelled Westworld, but its erasure didn’t stop there. Warner Bros. Discovery removed the series from HBO Max in December 2022 (just four months after season 4 ended), shifting the series to ad-supported platforms, like Tubi and the Roku Channel. The move felt like WB wasn’t just canceling Westworld but dropping it straight into the recycling bin.
Its cancellation and removal from Max might be official enough for most shows, but this is Westworld we’re talking about, one of HBO’s biggest tentpoles of the 2010s. In an era where legacy HBO properties continue receiving revivals and spin-offs — like the Deadwood movie and The Sopranos prequel, The Many Saints of Newark — the possibility of Nolan and Joy returning to finish the story has never fully dissipated.
In the lead-up to the premiere of Fallout, Nolan even told The Hollywood Reporter that he still intended to finish Westworld as originally planned. “Yes, 100%. We’re completionists,” he said, adding, “It took me eight years and a change of director to get Interstellar made. We’d like to finish the story we started.” Four years after the series was cancelled, with its episodes still absent from Max and an entirely new Westworld movie now in development, those comments feel far less hopeful than they once did.
However, the irony shouldn’t be lost on Westworld fans. Despite WB’s many attempts to erase Westworld in the past, the company still sees the value in the franchise, value that would not exist without the 2016 series. Not even Warner seems fully capable of shutting the park down for good. On one hand, the new movie might well cement the fact that the 2016 show will never get the violent ends it deserved. On the other hand, its revival proves the studio still sees a reason to invest in the franchise.
Who knows? There’s always a chance Nolan and Joy might eventually get to finish the narrative they started. But for a series built on loops and repetition, perhaps Westworld was never meant to escape its own.